Beyond Reasonable Doubt (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Murdered Bride - full transcript

The Rasmussen case was probably

the oldest unsolved case that I have ever

had to go back and look at.

What in god's name, ah, why did they murder her?

The case then goes cold until there's

a massive revolution in forensic science called DNA.

When the DNA profile finally did come back,

it turned the case on its head.

Once you realise who the suspect is,

you kind of wish it was anybody else.

I think every homicide detective



feels like they owe something to the victim.

We see them in their worst moment.

You're going to be the last one to actually speak for them.

You're going to be the one that's going to say,

"This is what happened to this person.

They can't tell you what it is, but I can."

My name is Robert Bub.

I'm retired from the Los Angeles Police Department,

where I did 33 years, 22 of which I worked homicide.

This is the story of one of the most interesting cases

I've been involved in,

and it happened 23 years before I'd ever heard of the victim.

The case itself is intricately linked with

one of the greatest scientific advances for police work,



DNA.

Sherri Rasmussen,

she'd been married

for approximately four months.

It had been what some would call a whirlwind romance.

She'd only met him about a year or so before,

John Ruetten, her husband.

They'd moved into the condo that they shared

in the city of Van Nuys.

They were a striking couple,

your department store picture frame couple.

John was an engineer.

Sherri was the director of nursing

at Glendale Adventist Hospital.

She had been brought in fairly young to that position,

but it was a testament to her qualities,

her intelligence, and her personality.

She was very well-liked

by her co-workers and her friends,

loved by her family, her husband.

The original detective on the Sherri Rasmussen case,

Lyle Mayer,

he'd been with Van Nuys for a number of years

and had an extensive career working homicide.

When I arrived,

obviously there was patrol officers there

that had secured the crime scene.

The condo was lovely.

It was the type of place that

a young married couple would be in.

They're starting their young careers,

they're starting their lives.

We obviously did investigative procedures

at the crime scene

There was photographs taken from all positions...

There was fingerprints taken by fingerprint experts...

We interviewed John.

John apparently came home from work,

entered the residence

through the subterranean garage,

and when he came upstairs...

...John immediately saw that his wife

was lying in the middle of the living room floor

and obviously deceased.

He was extremely distraught, naturally.

He gave me information that could be corroborated.

We did that immediately

so that'll eliminate him as an initial suspect.

It was very obvious

there was a tremendous struggle in the complex.

There was no obvious areas of entry

that had been broken into.

Seeing the ransacking

and the stacking of electronic equipment

near the exit door to the garage

lead us to believe

that a residential burglary

was what was going on here

The decedent was still dressed in night clothing.

It appeared to myself and my investigative partner...

...that the decedent had been scared by an intruder.

The suspect pulled a gun on her,

possibly threatening her,

In my opinion,

Sherri was fighting for her life.

Arms were waving,

the gun was being fired,

the shots were going up into a glass window frame...

The suspect, I believe, was losing the fight.

I believe the decedent got the gun away from the suspect...

... but was afraid to shoot the suspect.

There was probably talk,

there was probably screaming...

It was obvious, in the investigative process,

the suspect was panicking,

losing the fight,

bit the decedent on the arm,

tremendously--

a full, full-teeth bite-mark on the arm.

Obviously the decedent was in pain.

in my opinion,

dropped the gun...

The suspect grabbed a porcelain statue

and hit the decedent over the head,

I think knocked her out.

The suspect then, err, utilized a pillow,

put it over the decedent,

and shot and executed the person.

From there we began the day to day

trudging of an investigation into a homicide.

I did a analysis of the recovered bullets...

I did a great investigative

trajectory path of the gunshots...

In the initial investigation,

one of the things that we're able to determine

was the weapon used, by type and calibre,

was a .38 or .357 calibre handgun,

based on the striations, the twists,

and the bullets themselves that were recovered,

and that it was a revolver--

because there was no brass,

no expended shell casings

left behind,

as you would find with a semi-automatic handgun.

There was a reward provided

by the City of Los Angeles

for any information leading to the arrest and conviction

of the murderer of Sherri Rasmussen.

We canvassed the whole

San Fernando Valley burglary reports.

And then a breakthrough.

There had been a number of residential burglaries

within the area.

And the fact that there was a residential burglary

a couple of weeks prior

in a complex similar to this,

not far away,

where two suspects were observed.

One of them did have a gun.

We thought, wow, this is a great,

great piece of investigative information for us.

We developed some

composite drawings of them,

but they were kind of generic.

As a detective,

having something so similar occur

in proximity to where your murder occurred...

I can see that as being a viable lead,

something that you'd wanna follow up on.

At that particular time,

we had minimal evidence

to indicate anything other than

a residential burglary gone bad,

where the suspect had a gun,

the victim confronted the persons

and shots were fired,

the victim lost.

Unfortunately, after that,

our investigation never led us to any

significant suspect or suspects.

It was kind of a dead end.

Eventually you have to move on, do other cases,

because there's other families that're

going through exactly the same situation.

After 60 days,

I had to write an extensive report,

which was submitted to the robbery homicide unit

and the chief of police

After that,

the case becomes a cold case.

At one point we cleared

all of our homicides in Van Nuys during the 80s.

But the fact that hers was unsolved

was a challenge to all of us.

You were always looking for someone

who might give you some information

about the murder of Sherri.

This was the case that I wanted to solve,

and we just could not get

that investigative lead to solve the case.

Time was not on our side.

Nothing weighs more on a detective

than knowing that they couldn't solve a case.

They hope maybe down the road somebody else picks up

and is able to push it over the finish line.

When the original detectives

walked into the Rasmussen apartment that night,

the idea of DNA

wasn't anything that was even close

to a viable investigative tool.

They had what they had,

and they exhausted what they had

to then best of their abilities.

But the advent of DNA was really a step forward,

especially in the area of homicide investigation.

The first DNA case in the United States

was in Florida.

That individual was prosecuted in 1987.

And from there, it just grew and grew.

DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid.

It is the molecular blueprint for all of life.

DNA is this amazing long molecule,

that is twisted and wound up

inside of every cell of our body

and in essence it makes us unique.

It makes us who we are,

and unique from each other.

In the early 2000s,

the Los Angeles Police Department

out of Robbery Homicide Division

created a Cold Case Homicide Unit

that basically went back

and looked at a number of cases

that because of the advent of DNA

might then be worked,

and the Sherri Rasmussen case was one of the cases.

In November 2001,

I was a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department,

Robbery Homicide Division, Cold Case Squad.

With Sherri Rasmussen,

when I obtained the reports,

and I was able to look at

the photographs from the crime scene,

it looks like she fought for her life.

It appears that she is at home alone,

her husband went to work that morning

and somebody broke in,

or she opened the door for someone,

and there just was one hell of a fight.

There was blood streaks on the wall,

the windows are broken out,

things are toppled...

I think the stereo speakers and stereo equipment was stacked up

as if a burglar might've been intending to take them.

This is a woman totally innocent

and then somebody murders her brutally.

I mean, just stood over her and shot into her body.

So that one I wanted to solve.

I went back through the autopsy...

The decedent had numerous points of trauma.

She had three gunshot wounds to the torso,

to the front of her...

She also had blunt force trauma of the head and face.

She had bruising,

abrasions, and lacerations

That means that there was close contact

between the assailant and her

when she is being killed.

A bite mark was noted on the decedent's left arm.

We don't see bite marks that often in forensic medicine,

but when we see a bite mark,

it has been drilled into us

that we have to swab that bite mark--

particularly for an assailant's saliva.

So, you don't want to push too deep

but you don't want to be too light

because you need to try to get as much

off of that bite mark as you possibly can.

The bite mark was photographed, measured,

and they swabbed the bite mark

to do blood typing,

which was the science of the day.

You might be surprised to know that you could actually

determine a person's blood type by looking at other body fluids,

because 80 percent of us are called secretors.

So in other words,

we secrete some of our proteins that allow us to determine

what your blood type is in your saliva.

There were two different blood types found there...

O, which was Sherri's...

The other blood type that was found there was an A.

A suspect who is a secretor

and you can determine that his blood type is A

narrows your suspect pool

down to about 40 percent of the general population.

So in the 1980's,

even though we weren't doing DNA typing,

there were good habits in place

because you understood that you could take these stains--

as long as you preserved them, you dried them,

you put them in a freezer, you kept them in the dark.

All these steps tried to preserve the stains

for improved testing.

We knew that person had physically touched our victim,

had bitten our victim.

I said, "Great, we have some DNA."

And then we made requests

and submitted the sample to our lab for the testing.

The job of a forensic scientist

is to provide a support to investigators

that're trying to solve these very difficult crimes.

I don't know if you could imagine

what it's like to walk into a room

and see a dead body,

and be the person responsible for figuring out who did that.

And that's why the evolution of DNA

has been so amazing.

The first DNA test

started looking at perhaps one marker,

or the next test maybe nine markers,

or the last test, the test we use now,

allow us to now look at something called amelogenin,

and that's a marker that tells us

whether it's from a male or a female.

If it's from a male,

we'll see an X and Y chromosome is present.

If it's from a female, we'd see an X and an X.

The criminalist, informed me-- gave me a call--

said, "Hey, I typed it for DNA."

I said, "Okay, and...?"

She goes, "It's a female."

And that kinda set me back. I'm sitting there. "A female?"

We started out maybe just being able to

answer the question, "Does this person's DNA match?"

Now we can actually get

potential lead information from some of it.

We can say whether it's from a male,

whether it's from a female.

They might've assumed

this bite-mark was made from a male,

but in fact,

it's made from a female.

So that had to have changed

the whole direction of the investigation.

The Rasmussen case was probably

the oldest unsolved case

that I have ever had to go back and look at.

Most of the cases

just by nature of how old they were

and other circumstances,

a lot of the evidence was no longer around.

It hadn't been stored properly, or for one reason or another,

mistakes are made

and some of the evidence is disposed of.

The surprising thing in the Rasmussen case

was when the DNA profile came back

and the secondary profile,

aside from Sherri Rasmussen,

came back to a female.

Not what the original detectives had looked at.

Historically,

there were very few female burglars.

Maybe we needed to start looking at someone closer to Sherri.

Suddenly now you're looking at suspects

who might've known your victim,

who are female,

and might've had a reason to not like the victim.

So, especially in this particular case,

that was a real breakthrough,

that they could use this DNA typing

to give them a lead like that.

At that point we started to turn around

and re-examine the case again with fresh eyes.

And little things started to jump out at us

that then seemed to fly in the face of

the initial burglary theory.

You can look at a cold case, and you can look at photographs,

you can look at diagrams...

The drawer that was pulled out from the end table

in between the two chairs

might initially look like something had been ransacked.

But again, then you look at the coffee table itself

and something that would hit the coffee table

strong enough to knock those items off

but not knock the coffee table off line

with the couch and the love seat,

just didn't jibe for us.

The placement itself of the audio-visual equipment

at the bottom of the stairs,

when the initial point of entry for a burglar

was determined to be the front door,

because there were no forced entry anywhere else...

You would think that the those items

would be placed closer to the front door.

A different picture started to emerge for us.

The fact that it's a contact wounds

and there's a bite mark.

It's a close,

more personal murder

than say a burglar who's being caught

and just wants to escape,

fires a couple of rounds and takes off.

It just didn't jibe once we knew that it was a female.

This lead us to believe that possibly

the entire burglary scene had been staged.

We began to compile a list of people,

females in Sherri's life,

who may have had contact with her,

who may have had a dispute with her.

We narrowed it down to five women

that we wanted to take a look at and eliminate.

Her mother and her sister. She had a roommate.

There was a female that she'd had an issue with

at Glendale Adventist Hospital.

And then there was possibly an ex-girlfriend

of Sherri's husband John.

In looking at her mother and her sister,

they were eliminated just because

familial DNA would have been a much closer match

than what we actually found.

We went back to Nels Rasmussen,

Sherri's father.

He informed us that we should be looking at

the ex-girlfriend of Sherri's husband John...

that he thought may have been

capable of committing this crime.

After the murder occurred,

John moved in with some friends,

I believe in the San Diego area,

and eventually relocated there.

He met his current wife,

and they married and began raising a family,

and he's been in San Diego area ever since.

Our initial inquiry into Sherri's husband John

was just to inform him that we were

investigating the case again.

He was co-operative.

We asked John who this ex-girlfriend was.

John identified Stephanie Lazarus to us.

They had met while both attending college at UCLA,

and that they had had kind of an off-and-on relationship.

All indications were that she was

more attracted to John than John was to her.

When he and Sherri met and started dating,

he had told Stephanie

that their relationship was over.

Once we had identified through John Ruetten

that Stephanie Lazarus was his ex-girlfriend,

we went back to Nels Rasmussen,

Sherri's father.

he informed us

that in late January of 1986,

Sherri had been at a family event

and that Sherri had related a story to him

that a female had shown up Glendale Adventist Hospital.

...And during that verbal confrontation

had said, "If I can't have John,

nobody's going to have him."

It left Sherri with a sense of foreboding.

When we started looking at

Stephanie Lazarus

in hopes that this would connect up with Sherri's murder,

we started going back through the book

to see if there were mention of her name.

It was a shock to our system.

We were looking at an active- duty police officer for murder.

There's a gamut of emotions that you run through.

You realise who the suspect is,

and what this means for the department,

for her family...

This was going to be difficult.

I think there's an initial moment of disbelief.

One of our own officers

was suspected in committing a brutal murder.

Stephanie Lazarus

was a highly-decorated

and a very well-liked police detective

on the Los Angeles Police Department.

She'd been in some sought-after jobs.

She was a DARE instructor,

which is officers that teach about drug abuse.

She had made detective.

She had worked Internal Affairs for a certain amount of time.

And she was eventually selected to go to

the Commercial Crimes Division,

and she was one of two

detectives who specialized in forged and stolen art.

I knew very little about Stephanie Lazarus.

I certainly had seen her

around the building many times.

I knew she was an instructor

for the department on certain subjects.

I knew she had a reputation

for being very out-going, aggressive...

High-energy person.

It was abundantly clear that maintaining the confidentiality,

the actual secrecy of this case was going to be paramount...

Notwithstanding the fact that Stephanie Lazarus at that time

worked on our floor in the next office,

and was often in our offices,

you know, socializing with her friends and colleagues

that she knew in our division.

If Lazarus didn't pan out as a viable suspect,

we didn't want a good officer's

reputation and her name dragged through the mud

if it turned out she had

absolutely nothing to do with the case.

So all our conversations with regards to that

were made with the door closed.

It was a peculiar feeling,

that we were investigating one of our own for a murder.

But the other side of that coin--

the family and the victim,

they deserved a certain amount of justice

and it wasn't anything that we were gonna

pack up and put away.

We did the same background

that we would do on any suspect.

Short of being able to interview co-workers,

family members,

because it would tip them off that we were looking at her

with regards to a murder.

As we looked at Stephanie Lazarus' background,

we found that she had been married to

another detective on the department.

And that detective

was assigned to a division

which was on the floor

just below us at Van Nuys Division.

We ran her through the computer system

to find out what weapons had been registered to her.

She'd had two two-inch revolvers,

.38 calibre, that were registered to her.

That was the calibre of the bullet that had killed

Sherri Rasmussen.

It struck me as odd

that someone would own two of them.

We found out that the first two-inch .38

she reported stolen

from the City of Santa Monica,

and the second one was purchased, I believe,

about ten days after the murder occurred.

In addition, she'd been on a few days off,

leading up to and including

the day the murder occurred.

We knew we could go no further with it

without a more positive link between

Stephanie Lazarus and the murder itself.

We elected to attempt to get a DNA sample.

There was no other real viable leads

beyond Stephanie Lazarus at that point,

and the DNA was a make-or-break item.

We needed to get a DNA sample

from Stephanie Lazarus.

While some people may think

the DNA for an active officer is on file,

there is no file for active officers.

Your DNA is not sampled

and is not stored anywhere for later comparison.

Even fingerprints that're taken when you come on the job

are kept in a separate file in the Department of Justice,

in Sacramento, in California.

There are three ways you could

get a DNA reference sample.

The first way is you can ask them.

When you interview them, or you talk to them,

you can ask them to voluntarily give you a sample.

The second way is you go to a judge.

You establish probable cause,

and they give you a court order

or a search warrant of some kind,

and that then forces the individual

to give you a sample.

The third way that you can go about

trying to get a DNA sample

would actually be to

surreptitiously collect a sample.

The investigators can follow the individual around

and wait for them to discard something in the trash,

on the ground...

It is legal for us to collect anything that's been abandoned,

if you think of it that way.

When we're looking at a suspect,

even in a cold case, they are a murder suspect.

And there is a certain amount of

deference you have to pay to that,

for the safety of the people around them,

for officer safety...

At this point,

our next step was gonna have to be

something along the lines of the surreptitious DNA.

We elected to go through

our Professional Standards Bureau,

which works just these kinds of cases,

where a suspect is a police officer.

The PSB surveillance unit followed Stephanie Lazarus

on a day that she was off.

She had gone to a store,

and had gotten a soda...

When she was done,

she put the cup and straw

in a trash receptacle.

Once she left the scene,

they recovered it and brought it down to be booked...

And then it was submitted for testing.

Potentially on the end of the straw

would be coming in contact with an individual's mouth,

which would then leave saliva and genetic material behind,

in the form of buccal cells,

or the skin cells that line the inside lining of your mouth.

In the lab

you could swab the straw

and go ahead and start the DNA analysis procedure

with that straw

by analyzing the swab.

By the nature of this case,

it was rushed.

I received a phone call from our SID people...

We were informed that it was indeed a match...

...between the DNA swab from the bite mark

and the swab from the soda

that was discarded by Stephanie Lazarus.

The original murder happened in 1986.

I mean, this was 23 years prior,

and the idea that the evidence was still there,

that it was still viable enough,

and then the years after that,

that you're able to actually get a DNA match...

We knew that if the DNA

did come back to Stephanie Lazarus,

that the case would be transferred downtown.

At that point

I received a phone call from

one of the supervisors at Robbery Homicide Division.

He said, "I understand you have a case for me."

Robbery Homicide Division are the best of the best.

These are detectives that come from

all divisions across the City.

They've all had extensive homicide experience,

they've worked big cases, they've worked notable cases...

Detective Dan Jaramillo and Detective Greg Stearns

were the main case agents.

Certainly there was a big concern

that if Stephanie became aware of this investigation

that she could flee,

that she might harm herself,

that she might harm other people.

This is obviously something that she had gotten away with

for 26 years.

She was getting close to retirement.

I mean, her career with the department was about--

y'know, about to end on a happy note,

and she was married had a young daughter,

and obviously there was no good outcome.

My partner and I,

we really had to start concentrating on

to devise a strategy for interviewing Stephanie Lazarus

and trying to see if we could find a way

to get her to sit down with us and talk about a murder

that we believe she had committed.

We had been given a directive from the chief of police

that we had to interview her in our jail.

And his reasoning

was that he wanted us in an environment

where weapons are not allowed.

As a matter of policy in our jail,

you're not allowed to be armed.

We had an entire operational plan that had been set up.

We had a search warrant

to search Stephanie's home,

her vehicles,

and also her work space,

and also her car at work.

There was a surveillance element that followed Stephanie,

making sure that she actually came to work,

because again we were very concerned

about her being tipped off.

And if she was to try and flee,

then we had a surveillance entity

that was there to prevent that from happening.

There were team leaders that were designated.

They were given sealed envelopes

and they were told to go to various locations.

And the team leader would open the envelope

and then they would understand what was happening.

I mean, I think the majority of the division

felt that we were arresting a politician from this city

because the level of secrecy was so high.

So there were a lot of moving pieces that day,

apart from just the interview itself.

So we get the word that Stephanie arrived at work.

My partner went to go make contact with her.

I went down to the jail.

I turned on the equipment so that she could be recorded...

How are we going to get Stephanie

to come to the jail to come talk to us?

The plan was that my partner Dan Jaramillo

approached her at her desk in the morning

and told her that we had this suspect in custody

who's talking about stolen art,

and would she mind coming down to the jail where he was

to talk to him and help us out.

This is probably the most pressure

I'd ever felt in interviewing a suspect.

Do you know John Ruetten?

John Root-en?

John Rutt-en?

Yeah, I went to school with him.

I mean, are you guys...

Is this somethin'...

I mean, you said I was going to interview somebody about art,

and now you guys are, I mean...

Had you ever met his wife?

I may have.

Remember her first name?

Shelley?

Um, Sherri...?

I don't know, somethin', maybe--

You know, like I said, it's been so many years.

Once we have to transition pivot to the subject of the murder,

I think we both expected that interview was gonna end,

that this was probably gonna be a five-minute interview...

It's always important to

try and get a statement from a suspect,

to try and understand from their perspective,

why this murder happened.

Obviously, y'know, the end-goal would be a confession.

From all the years, as far as you can remember,

do you remember ever talking to her?

There had been an incident in which Stephanie had come to

Sherri's workspace at the hospital

and there had been a verbal confrontation.

And it had been witnessed by Sherri's secretary.

Well, Sherri's secretary had passed away

in the intervening years,

and so that was something that was

never going to come into a court of law

because we didn't have a witness.

However, in speaking to Stephanie,

she obviously remembered that that altercation had taken place

and it had been witnessed by at least one person.

Yeah, yeah, I may have... I am thinking back now.

You guys are bringing up all these old memories.

And now I'm thinking I may have gone to her

and said, "Hey, you know what, is he dating you?

He's bothering me."

And so I'm thinking that we had a conversation about that.

So that was a huge get for us in the interview

because we can now corroborate

a pretty significant event that had happened.

Do you know what happened to his wife?

Yeah, I know she got killed.

As we started to get closer and closer to the subject

of the death of Sherri, the murder...

Y'know, visibly,

she was becoming more and more nervous.

Did you ever fight with her?

You mean, like we fought?

Yeah, did you ever duke it out with her?

No, I don't think so. I mean...

You would remember that, right?

That would be a pretty...

...pretty specific.

Yeah, like I said, obviously...

You know, I mean...

It just doesn't sound familiar.

I mean, what are they saying?

So, I fought with her? So, so...

Getting the jump, or the leap...

They're saying I fought with her, so I must've killed her.

I mean, c'mon. I mean, that's... Y'know...

I don't even know who these people are.

I can't even say I met any of these people.

I mean, it's insane.

And its relating to a guy that you were dating,

and she is dating now.

Just like a whole love triangle type of thing.

You figure you would remember that, right?

Well, I would think.

So, if we ask you to give us a DNA sample,

a Buccal swab,

so we can identify or eliminate you,

would you be willing to do that?

Maybe.

'Cause I know this... I...

That's what we're onto.

I mean, because right now, from looking at the evidence,

it's possible we may have some DNA at the location.

I just can't even believe it.

I mean, this is just...

I mean, I'm shocked, I'm really shocked,

that somebody would be saying that I did this.

I mean, we had a fight and so I went and killed her?

I mean, come on.

That's...

Okay, alright.

Thanks for giving me the courtesy.

Thanks for your time.

And she got up to walk out of the interviewing room

and walked a short distance in the hallway

and was met by our arrest team that we had in place.

I think that there was the shock

that for 26 years that she had gotten away with this.

That if I was gonna get caught,

I was gonna get caught early-on in the investigation,

and it never happened...

That this was something that was done

that never gonna come back to haunt her.

As we're leaving the building,

there were helicopters swarming all over headquarters.

The news was already out

that we had arrested one of our own for murder.

And I remember saying to my partner, "Oh my God,

what did we just do?"

Because this was something

that's obviously extremely rare--

Arresting one of our own members for a murder.

That hadn't happened in decades.

A Los Angeles Police detective

has pleaded Not Guilty

to the 1986 murder of her ex-boyfriend's wife...

The trial was over six weeks in length.

Even though you feel you have phenomenal evidence in the case,

you never know how that jury's gonna evaluate that evidence.

This would be speculation on my part,

but I believe Stephanie went there to try and abduct Sherri

to take her somewhere else, to kill her.

And at the point that Sherri fought back,

the plan went awry.

And at that point she to stage the burglary

and then really kind of distance herself from John,

because to be close to John after that

would've been to greatly increase the likelihood

that she would be identified as a suspect.

What we thought was her motive for the murder...

She thought that with Sherri out of the way,

she could come back into the relationship.

But I think she overestimated it again,

how John felt about her.

All these things kinda led us to the idea

that she had never really gotten over John Ruetten

as the first love of her life.

What I found interesting was,

when John Ruetten got up and made his impact statement..

Your Honour, I'm John Ruetten.

Sherri Rasmussen had a profound impact on so many people...

I was proud that she agreed to be my wife.

...And the fact that Sherri's death

occurred because she met and married me

brings me to my knees.

I do not know, and fear I will never know,

how to cope with this appalling fact.

Stephanie, during that impact statement...

Though she didn't look at John Ruetten,

it seemed like she was paying attention

to everything that he was saying,

almost as if there was still,

in her mind,

a connection between her and John Ruetten.

Stephanie had a journal

that we found in her home

where she had talked about different times she was upset.

There was a very powerful attraction for her

to John Ruetten.

She was devastated

when he chose to end it and pursue Sherri.

And in searching her computers,

and learning that years after the murder and after,

she was already married to her husband,

that she was still searching for John,

trying to see where he lived, for example...

She still had not let go of this person

from her life, from her mind,

We the jury, in the above entitled action,

find the defendant Stephanie Eileen Lazarus

guilty of the crime of the murder of Sherri Rasmussen.

Stephanie Lazarus got 27 years in prison,

plus a certain amount of time for the use of a firearm.

To me it doesn't weigh against the amount of time that Sherri

never had with the rest of her family.

DNA in this particular case

gave us the perspective to go back

and look at other things--

how the apartment looked, how she was treated,

and just the idea that it was

different from the original theory of the crime.

DNA is the lynch pin

in solving this case.

And in this case,

it was able to take us all the way through to a conviction.